Demolition: Old House (part 7): crushing

After knocking down the house, we were left with somewhere in the region of 100-150 tonnes of rubble. We originally made some enquiries about having it all taken away, but that would be expensive. And we still needed to bring the ground level up around the house, which would mean paying again to bring more hardcore in. 

So the obvious solution seemed to be for us to crush all the rubble into usable hardcore... the only problem was that we had no experience of doing any of that. We did try to get a specialist firm in, but after they messed us around continually for weeks we gave up and resigned ourselves to yet again having to do everything on our own.

 

Getting a crusher was tricky. Not many hire companies have them and we live in a pretty isolated area so most firms that actually stocked them refused to deliver to us. Eventually we found a company that agreed to supply us and after booking a week off work, we took delivery of the crusher.

 

A local hire firm also supplied us with a (rather battered) mini-dumper...

 

 ... and a 1.5 tonne mini-digger. So we were all set.

 

This was going to be nerve-wracking. The crusher was brand new and we had no experience of using this type of machine; any dents or scrapes would lead to a hefty fine and lost deposit.

The crusher was 'driven' via a large remote control unit. We didn't have much room to manoeuvre the vehicle, so threading it around the narrow side path to the back garden was a tricky undertaking and we had to trim a few tree branches to squeeze it in.

It felt a bit like one of those sliding puzzle games; the piles of rubble would all have to be crushed in the right order, otherwise we wouldn't be able to get the crusher around the back of the garden.

This massive stack of rubble was blocking our path so would have to be cleared first.

The lack of space made it awkward to get the digger into position too.

A view from the driving seat of the digger. We loaded the blocks into the top of the crusher and a continuous stream of crushed material would pour off the end of the conveyor belt.   

Initially we loaded the crushed material directly into the mini-dumper...

... and then drove each load around to the front of the house...

... gradually spreading the crushed material along the way.

This worked alright for a while, but then disaster struck. The mini-dumper ground to a halt with damage to its caterpillar tracks.

The hire company initially tried to blame us for the damage, but we argued the dumper was simply not fit for purpose. It was delivered in terrible condition, was a struggle to even get the engine started and it fell apart after just a day's light use.

What a piece of crap!

 

 

 

 

After some debate, they eventually agreed to send someone over to repair it, but with the dumper out of action for a while, we had no option but to abandon the idea of spreading the material around the site and just concentrated on getting everything crushed.

 

(two photos stitched together - the house doesn't look this wonky in real life!)

 

 

 

 

We could only fit a small 1.5 tonne mini-digger around the side path and its bucket only just reached the top of the crusher. That meant the crusher had to be carefully positioned in order to be able to feed it with rubble. 

 

Driving the crusher using its remote control unit was quite good fun though.

 

 

 

 

The crusher steadily chewed its way through all those big, heavy blocks. Unfortunately it also got blocked fairly regularly and that meant continually shutting down its crushing jaws and pulling out the blockages by hand, which was both time-consuming and rather back-breaking too.

  

 

 

The cement and concrete dust from all that crushed material was pretty nasty stuff and despite wearing safety equipment, caused us some painful skin rashes. We didn't realise that the dry cement dust could still react with the moisture in sweat and cause chemical burns. Luckily the wind direction was generally blowing it away from us, but unfortunately that sent the dust directly onto our red Acer tree which left half of its leaves badly burned!  

 

 

 

 The site was gradually getting clearer as we worked our way through all the rubble piles... 

(click on pic to enlarge)

... though we were still left with enormous piles of crushed stone. The dumper had been repaired but with only a week off work to get the crushing done, we weren't going to have time to spread all the material around the site too.

 

Luckily the site inspector chipped in with all the hard work and assisted with the driving of the digger. Unfortunately his arms weren't long enough to reach the controls, but full marks for trying.

After a week of solid work, we'd got rid of all the huge piles of rubble... and replaced them with huge piles of hardcore! Still at least we'd turned the old house into some usable materials that we could recycle to raise levels all around the house.

 

Our friends christened this range of hills "Mount Crushmore".

 

Although covered in cement dust, the house already looked so much better with a bit of clear space around it. For the first time since it was built, the house didn't feel shoe-horned into the site and looked like it could finally 'breathe'.     

 

As ever, the site inspector did his rounds.

 

Sunset over Mount Crushmore.

Demolition: Old House (part 6): floors and site clearance

RUBBLE TROUBLE.

With the worst of the winter gone, it was time to resume the demolition of the old house. We'd managed to sell anything of value on Ebay, but were still left with piles of rubbish that needed to be cleared.  

 

Anything that couldn't be burnt or sold would have to be chucked out, so we hired a skip.

With some careful packing we were hoping to fit all of the rubbish in one skip (skips are very expensive these days...) We started by loading all the biggest, heaviest items, like the old steel kerosene tank, radiators, oil boiler, and UPVC windows and doors

There was so much junk, but we managed to cram most of it into the skip. A lot more was wedged in after this picture was taken and by the time it was collected it was piled high.

Back at the site, we needed to break up all the concrete floors, but in order to get to them, we would first need to clear away a lot of the fallen rubble.

Each of the large blocks weighed around 50kg (that's two bags of cement), so we had to break most of them up into halves or quarters just so we could comfortably carry them to the various rubble piles that were forming around the perimeter.

More rubble needed clearing on the west side; the gable wall on this side had been particularly hard to demolish as the walls were more like a solid concrete bunker.

 Gradually we shifted the blocks out to the sides and started to expose the concrete floor slab.

 

Luckily there didn't appear to be any foundations under the house (which would have meant even more concrete to break up). The lowest blocks appeared to have been laid directly onto any old bits of slate that they found lying around when they originally built the place and had a thick layer of soil under them in place of mortar! That partially explains the horrendous problem with damp in that house.

Once we'd cleared the blocks, we could start demolishing the floor using an electric breaker. This particular section was pretty weak so luckily didn't take too long to smash up...

...but as ever, this accursed house was going to make things as difficult as possible for us and having removed one slab, we found another (much harder) concrete slab was hidden underneath. Sigh.

Finally that section was gone so we moved on to the next and repeated the process.

The site inspector arrived to conduct a through audit of our progress.

That's about half of the floors taken up.

 

Unfortunately there was a LOT of hardcore buried underneath the floors too. We didn't remove it as we planned to hire a crusher later and would need a firm base on which to operate. 

 

All the concrete we had excavated from the floors, was creating several more mountainous piles of rubble. We were getting concerned with the amount of material that we would have to deal with; for a small bungalow it seemed a ridiculous amount of rubble.

 

The other side of the floor needed a lot of clearing, thanks to all the additional slate and bricks from the top half of the fireplace.

Once cleared, the slab in this section of the house (our old bedroom) looked quite soft but also much higher and newer than the other floors.

There was something a bit odd about that floor... could this conceal the hidden treasure we'd been hoping for?

As we gradually cleared the site, we were getting a better idea of what the garden was going to look like and began to start planning what we might do with the space. 

 

The view from the main bedroom looked very different and so much brighter now the old house was gone.

Before:

 After:

The already-mountainous rubble piles were growing bigger by the day...

The old tiled kitchen floor was next...

It was all going so well. Only one section of concrete left and this was the 'suspiciously' new slab that we hoped concealed the long-awaited treasure.

 

With the slab removed we could finally peel back the plastic membrane and see what riches we had underneath...

 

Asbestos. 

 

Lots of asbestos!

  Nooooooo!

During the demolition, we'd seen a couple of bits of asbestos pinned in the roof which suggested the property had once been lined with it. It was clear that rather than pay to have it removed, they'd simply buried it under the floor. Or perhaps unscrupulous builders had taken money to dispose of it and buried it under the new floor when the owner wasn't looking. Either way, once again this accursed house was simply refusing to go quietly and we were left with another expensive mess to sort out.

It's not the most dangerous type of asbestos, but we still did not take any chances and a disposable hazmat suit and respirator were required. First step was to dampen it all down to reduce the amount of dust and fibres...

 

... then pick each piece up carefully by hand and load it into strong rubble bags... 

... which we then carried out to the front of the property (this is about half of them - we ended up with about 40 bags - grrr). Each bag was then sealed and loaded into another bag which was also sealed. Nobody would take the asbestos unless it had been double-bagged.

It was a great relief when we'd finally cleared all the asbestos. The irresponsible attitude of the previous builders had cost us a lot of extra aggravation, time and money.

 

At last we'd finished all the floors. The site inspector arrived in his company vehicle and toured the site before giving it his final approval.